HIT ACCRED SNAFU. Today, I noticed this article in last week’s edition of the Lariat.
Nope, it’s not an article about clueless students loutishly complaining about the college’s ongoing efforts to comply with the Accreds' latest draconian and perverse stipulatitudes. It is, rather, an article about students signing up for Saddleback College's Health Information Technology (HIT) Program based on the college’s promise to get the program accredited (by the AHI-MA) asap—and then finding, at the end of their two years, that the accreditation didn’t happen and, as a consequence, they can’t take the all-important Registered Health Information Technician (RHIT) exam to become, um, HI technicians, I guess.
It sounds like it isn’t the college’s fault.
Check it out.
PUNK'CHEW'ATION. An editorial about gun control graces the top of page 2 of last week’s print edition. Online, the editorial is sensibly entitled The issue with gun control. For some reason, in the print edition, the same editorial is entitled:
Gun control is it Effective or not?Where's the colon? I think these kids think that punctuation is optional. Some of my students eschew periods. Some don't capitalize the first word in a sentence. Lots of 'em are into comma splices, run-ons, and sentence fragments. (I love writing, in red: "In college, you are expected to punctuate and to write complete sentences." That always makes me smile.)
Well, if that title isn’t enough to puke a dog off of a gut wagon, then the editorial’s last paragraph is:
Although the [Obama] proposed ban on military-style assault weapons and magazines that hold 10 rounds or more is unreasonable and ineffective, the 23 executive actions that President Obama signed on Jan. 26th are well-researched and provide real solutions in prosecuting and preventing gun crimes.I guess somebody told this kid that you’ve got to end your essay with one of those formula theses that embraces Pro “yet” grabs a big chunk of Con, too, like: “although I’m a Nazi, I really love my Jewish friends”—that sort of thing.
As my old pop would say, upon reading this kind of editorial, "I don't know whether to shit or go blind."
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| Duck Rabbit |
Since the Lariat is, after all, a college newspaper, I feel compelled to point out that the self-help guru that the Lariat writer promotes and celebrates—Kris Carr—is, in fact, a loon caught in a highly remunerative and enduring Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc moment: I was dying of cancer, and then I ate my veggies and embraced positivity, and now I live; therefore veggies and positivity cure cancer. QED.
But, as Lisa Roney has noted,
[Carr’s] focus is all on nutrition, yoga, support groups, and can-do attitude. However, H.E.A.R.D., a support group for this and other vascular cancers, notes on its webpage that, due to the variable rate of tumor growth in [her] cancer, “Some cases are totally asymptomatic (no adverse symptoms) for more than 15 or 20 years”....I'm all in favor of vegetarianism. I've been some kind of vegetarian (mostly) for more than 30 years. But quackery is quackery.
